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11 Trillion Reasons

Here’s a good line: “[U]nenlightened farm policy — with its massive subsidies for junk food ingredients — has played a pivotal role in shaping our food system over the past century. But that policy can readily be changed.”

With the possible substitution of the word “might” for “can,” this is pretty much an inarguable statement. It comes from “The $11 Trillion Reward: How Simple Dietary Changes Can Save Money and Lives, and How We Get There,” a report produced by the Union of Concerned Scientists (U.C.S.) to be introduced at the farmers’ market[1] at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital Wednesday.

That’s a big number, $11 trillion, but even if it’s off by 90 percent (it’s difficult to put a value on lives), who’s to scoff at a trillion bucks? In any case, this summary of current research, which contains the argument that even a tiny increase in our consumption of fruits and vegetables would have a powerful impact on health and its costs, agriculture and the economy, is compelling.

About 750,000 United States deaths annually — a third of the total — result from cardiovascular disease, at a medical cost of about $94 billion. The report (and video based on it) maintains that if we upped our average intake of fruits and vegetables by a single serving daily — an apple a day, essentially — more than 30,000 of those lives would be saved (at an overall “value,” according to the report, of $2.7 trillion). Each additional serving of fruit or vegetable would reduce mortality from cardiovascular disease by about 5 percent, to the point where if we all ate the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, we’d save more than 100,000 lives and something like $17 billion in health care costs.[2]

This is not new, but the report — written by the U.C.S. agricultural economist Jeffrey K. O’Hara — goes further, and points out that although Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) dietary guidelines encourage all of us to eat sufficient fruits and vegetables to derive these benefits, that same department’s agricultural policy encourages exactly the opposite — that is, damaging — behavior.
Thus we inevitably arrive at the infinitely negotiated Farm Bill, whose subsidies for commodity crops — soy, corn and wheat are our chief concerns — directly promote the production of foods high in hyperprocessed carbohydrates and fats (for simplicity’s sake, junk foods) and the kind of eating that is killing us. These policies come with many obvious direct costs, but also indirect ones. For by subsidizing the production of commodity crops we discourage the farming of fruits and vegetables — the foods that promote health.

A main point of the report is that encouraging farmers to grow fruits and vegetables and sell them locally boosts public health. Therefore, U.C.S. wants to see programs that do just that, plus support research for noncommodity crops, subsidize the development of new outlets for locally grown food and further encourage SNAP (food stamp) users to buy it.

A couple of other interesting points arise here. There’s been a bit of backlash about the new “L” word — local — by some economists, most pushers of industrial agriculture and other skeptics, who scoff at the notion that adequate amounts of food can be grown locally. Putting aside the fact that “increasing regional production” is a more accurate way to describe what progressives in the food movement are advocating (few would argue that all food should be local), it’s worth noting that with little government support the number of farmers’ markets has quadrupled in the last 20 years, and that farm-to-school programs have grown from six in 2001 to more than 10,000 now.

Even if direct subsidies for fruits and vegetables — “specialty crops,” as the U.S.D.A. almost mockingly calls them — were not forthcoming, a decrease in those subsidies for their competition would make these numbers even more impressive.[3]

Ending direct subsidies to what amounts to the enemies of good health makes so much sense that the U.C.S. report has received support from unexpected quarters. Eli Lehrer, president of the R Street Institute, a conservative think tank, told me that “The central point of the report — that government agricultural subsidies contribute to worse health — is an excellent one, one that hasn’t been made in this way.”

Even Lehrer’s critiques of the report are mild: “I can’t say I hate any of the policy recommendations they make — they’d be better than what we’re doing now — but if the subsidies are a problem, then replacing them with different types of subsidies isn’t the solution.”

My fear is that once you do away with subsidies for bad policies, the money is gone, and it will be difficult to get it back for the kind of programs U.C.S. advocates.

Still: I’ll stand on common ground with anyone who wants to abandon subsidizing the growing of corn, Big Food’s production of junk and, ultimately, the undermining of public health. What happens afterward can hardly be worse.

That’s the kind of thinking that Joshua Sewell, a senior policy analyst at the fiscally conservative Taxpayers for Common Sense, expressed as well: “There’s a notion that we have to have spending on agriculture, but where’s the money going and what are we getting out of it? The first step is to shift the paradigm and stop the harmful system we have now. The second step is to figure out the proper role of government, how to spend our money in a cost-effective manner: land grant universities should be doing research in the public interest, not corporate philanthropy.”

It’s not “cost-effective” — or, to put it more simply, smart — to subsidize the producers of food that makes us ill. They don’t need it — they’re already profitable, in part thanks to decades of subsidies — and there is no logic in helping corporations who are in the business of poisoning us to be more profitable. If government money is to go to agriculture, it should go to those farmers who are eager to grow the foods that will sustain us. What that’s worth is inestimable.

2. Note that this way of looking at things skips right by the obesity argument — which is fraught with controversy — and simply looks at the well-established notion that when you replace junk food with real fruits and vegetables you improve health.

3. Imagine how much more food would be grown locally and purchased at farmers markets if more cities had permanent structures like the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia or Eastern Market in Detroit, central markets where farmers were guaranteed not only space and shelter but a weekly or even daily crowd.